Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: anne.jones dumps core
Message-ID: <1990Mar16.191820.9978@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1990Mar15.185725.27695@ccu.umanitoba.ca>
Date: Fri, 16 Mar 90 19:18:20 GMT

In article <1990Mar15.185725.27695@ccu.umanitoba.ca> mills@ccu.umanitoba.ca (Gary Mills) writes:
>Has anyone else seen this problem?  Users complain that they get the
>following error when attempting to post an article with Pnews:
>
>/usr/local/lib/newsbin/inject/anne.jones: 5115 Memory fault - core dumped

Given that anne.jones is a shell file, it can't be dumping core itself.
The most obvious possibility is a core dump from awk:  in particular, old
awks tend to react badly to very long lines.  A nastier one is a core
dump from the shell -- we've seen reports that the Sun4 4.0 shell can dump
core on some of our shell programs in ill-defined circumstances.  (This is
all the more disgusting because the problem that is most likely to be to
blame was understood years ago, and Geoff's paper "A Partial Tour Through
the UNIX Shell" at San Diego Usenix explained it and how to fix it.)
-- 
MSDOS, abbrev:  Maybe SomeDay |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
an Operating System.          | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu